Question about primary data source for distributed environment

Tim, yes you app servers need to point to the same data sources (both primary and business).
However, we recommend adding an engine gateway only in very narrow circumstances. The additional gateway will provide load balancing for read transactions, which will not help performance if the majority of your transactions are writes. Multiple gateways require very stringent IO and network specs and put additional strain on your maintenance. I highly recommend you balance your needs with associated additional costs.

Thanks Mike!

Just to confirm, we are talking about distributed gateway, NOT multi-gateway, right?

TIA,
tdw

I think you are right and we are talking about different things. What do you mean by "distributed gateway"? Having different engines on different machines? Or do you mean having the app server and Appian engines on different hosts?

Either way each Appian environment needs its own primary datasource schema that is consistent across all hosts for the environment.

My understanding ...

Multi-Gateway: multiple machines each with its own full installation of Appian & all the engines. This is a high availability solution. In theory, if one machine goes down, the other(s) will take over and still be running all the engines.

Distributed Gateway: multiple machines each with its own installation of Appian with a subset of the engines so that together they run all the engines. This is a load balancing solution. This way if one machine is not able to handle the full load of all 16 engines, a subset of the engines may be split off to another server.

In a Multi-Gateway, the servers all access the same data source. I would think the same would have to be true in a distributed gateway architecture; but, I'm looking for confirmation.

TIA,
tdw